Computers were rare, but Jeff got hooked, and eventually even his dad started programming. But this was the time when people weren’t learning to program JavaScript in the womb, so it was a little bit unusual. Bad BASIC software engineer at 13, that I’ll buy. Being a genius is something I definitely do not claim. It was a 11 year old’s version of an inference engine when he had no idea what he was doing. The logic inference engine was not a complete deductive inference engine. Because guess what? Jeff found the code.īut first, to understand the history of the true ELIZA code, we have to understand Jeff’s connection, which starts when he was 11 and he got access to a computer at his school, and built something called an inference engine. Maybe it did more than we thought it did. Possibly, Weizenbaum and his students were the only people who ever actually saw the code. Sometimes you write an algorithm, it’s highly mathematical. These days we don’t, we’d Github the code. And they prided themselves, the computer sciences at the time, of describing the algorithm, not Githubbing the code. We’re not totally sure how the original version worked. There are knockoff versions of it everywhere, even in Emacs right now. The paper had transcripts of conversations with ELIZA in it. So people were right to be amazed.ĮLIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum, who was a professor at MIT and published a paper about ELIZA. But also, this was a time when microwaves seemed impossibly futuristic. And partially, it was because of a trick of human perception, that we impute consciousness into things, whether they deserve it or not. But anyways, after the paper about ELIZA was published, what people thought they could expect from computers changed forever. It’s a little bit like rubber duck debugging, where you describe your problem to an inanimate object. Just say, “Tell me more about that,” repeatedly, until the person works the problem out themselves. If I said I was worried about my family, she’d say, “Tell me more about your family.” She was based on the work of the psychologist Carl Rogers, whose method of therapy was just to reflect back to people what they said to him. She was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. The mystery Jeff was working on was about ELIZA, the chat bot. And if I’m at a party of, I don’t know, philosophers, then I’m a linguist or something. I’m a party of psychologists, I’m a computer scientist. So if I’m at a party full of computer scientists, I’m a psychologist. What do I do? I can never answer that question. Why don’t you tell me your name and what you do? MAD Code(CC0 ELIZAGEN / Weizenbaum Estate)
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